Where Liberalism Is Alive and Well!

The Republican party has no shame. They lie, cheat and steal their way into office. They embody such good Christian values…cough, choke, spit.

I often fantasize about a movie in the style of “Oh God”, where George Burns (God) confronts people like Michelle Bachman and Louie Gohmert or a long list of Republicans who blatantly tell falsehoods, repeatedly and even after being called out on it. If there is a hell, I imagine there will be an especially hot place reserved for these people.

It’s not often that we get to see the birth of one of these lies, placenta and all. From Steve Benen…

The National Republican Senate Committee accused Markey yesterday of claiming he “invented the satellite dish, low-cost mobile phone calls, and the ability for cable companies to provide long distance service.” The NRSC added, “Perhaps Markey can use the technology he invented to call, tweet, or message his friend Al Gore, inventor of the internet.”

Conservative humor is just so droll, isn’t it?

The problem, of course, is that the National Republican Senate Committee is lying. For one thing, Al Gore never claimed to be the inventor of the Internet. It just never happened — Republicans distorted a Gore comment, the media uncritically ran with it, and a ridiculous smear quickly entered the public consciousness.

What Rep. Ed Markey helped to do in the 1992 Cable Act was to force the cable companies to license content to satellite companies in order to compete with the vertically integrated cable systems that were beginning their takeover of television markets. Competition being a good thing, right?

I guess it’s hard to blame them for attempting it, since the “Al Gore invented the internet” lie worked so well for them in 2000. And with the superficial media, who I’m beginning to think are illiterate, gladly helped to perpetuate that lie.

The sad thing is, the media is much worse than it was in 2000. Let’s see how they handle this one.

This was recorded on November 8, 2012, two days after the election. It marks the return of my insightful friend and colleague John to chat it up about the historic day of November 6, 2012. Topics include: The Fox News meltdown, the fun of watching it on the tube, looking forward and many other things. It’s a good one.

Here is the latest Extremely Liberal podcast with my special guest, a colleague who teaches a class on politics and the media. He brings great insight and experience to our discussion. Check it out, I bet you will like it.

On Friday, as any political junkie knows, President Obama and 140 Republicans from their caucus came together to have a discussion about a wide range of issues. The result of the meeting has spread around the internet and revealed the extreme biases that exist in our media. I found it curious that FOX News and Firedoglake, the brain child of Jane Hamsher, found common ground by trying to ignore that it ever really happened. FOX News reaction was predictable and in my mind so was FDL’s. I went over to FDL (even though I hate giving them clicks) and found they basically ignored the whole event on Friday. All the other progressive blogs were ablaze with clips, commentary, analysis and a lot of glee. It was a reminder to many of them of the skills of our president at framing issues, pushing pack against Republican talking points and a reaffirmation that we elected the best person for the job, Barack Obama. Once FDL did put up a post on the event, it reeked of their bitterness towards the president. They truly are following through with their idea during the election that if they can’t have Hillary Clinton, they don’t want anyone. From their first post mentioning the event entitled “It’s Called Debate, Not Hero Worship.” (I’m not linking to them because I don’t want them to get any more clicks, that’s what they want.)

To be sure, Obama and the WH staff deserve high praise for his performance yesterday, and they are rightfully getting it. I personally think it’s one of the best moves they’ve made. But let’s not respond to this event with the kind of undisguised and embarrassing hero-worship that was on display last night on MSNBC.

Although it may be true that Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow and Kieth Olbermann were a bit excited about the event and praised the president’s skills in this setting, but to portray it as hero worship harkens back to the election. Remember when the Hillary folks used that line over and over again because candidate Obama was soooooo popular and was able to get people fired up about his candidacy. Jealousy, bitterness anyone. The next post that FDL posted about the event was titled “Obama Debating Dummies Is Easy; How About Debating the Grownups on the Real Issues?” No snarkiness there, huh? Here is a chunk from that post…

Debates with deluded dummies in the hope of convincing them is not just pointless; it is a distraction from the more important discussions we need to be having.

It is mindless to debate phony Republican talking points about government health takeovers, with people who not only lied about death panels but cannot even acknowledge that every universal coverage/care system in the advanced world relies on extensive government structure, funding and price/quality regulation.

So it’s mindless to go on national television and take on these Republican talking points? Really? It’s mindless to confront the republican lies with well reasoned, factual information? Mindless? This post reveals the real motives of the folks at the Firedoglake, to damage the president as much as they can to prove that Hillary really should have been president, the votes of the people be damned. This post finishes up with even more drivel, pure shit…

The President has run away from real debates on these and a dozen other national issues. His refusal to engage genuine, credible critics while playing instead on the dummies’ anti-intellectual turf is what is crippling his credibility and sabotaging his ability to govern and actually solve these hard problems.

Dismissing the dummies should be the media’s job. If the President wants to have a debate on the real issues facing America, how about confronting the grown ups, and not just the 12-year olds?

So by taking on the opposition (Republican Party), you know, the ones with votes in the house and senate, he is “crippling his credibility and sabotaging his ability to govern”? By presenting his case to the American people and sharply shooting down the Republican talking points, he’s crippling his credibility? Wow, talk about spin. So he would have been better off debating the idiots at Firedoglake (not all are idiots I must say)? And then the final sentence reveals how naive these bitter people are by retreating to their fantasy world “Dismissing the dummies should be the media’s job”….how’s that working out for you. The media hasn’t done it’s job for many years, it’s a reality we all have to live in and as progressives, we must find ways to get our message out to the masses without relying on the media to do it. This forum was an awesome way to do it, I hope it happens more but I am doubtful that the Republicans will put themselves in that position again.

I’m sure all the haters will have reasons why this isn’t real, or wasn’t because of the stimulus, or was because of some other reason…..BITE ME!

Real gross domestic product -- the output of goods and services produced by labor and property
located in the United States -- increased at an annual rate of 5.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009,
(that is, from the third quarter to the fourth quarter), according to the "advance" estimate released by the
Bureau of Economic Analysis.

I’ve been watching the signs of the recovery for the last 6 months, lots of good or “not so bad” news has been coming for a while, but it has basically been ignored by the media because it doesn’t fit into their current narrative, that President Obama’s presidency has been a failure. Chew on this, bitches. When I see the slanted journalism that paints this picture of failure, I find comfort in the fact that reality will catch up with them and make them look like fools. You can only hide the truth for so long, eventually it finds its way into the public consciousness. President Obama’s speech the other night was one of the first steps in showing the reality of the last year, not what the right wing, Jane Hamsher, Arianna Huffington and Cenk Uygur have been trying to paint. I wonder how they are reacting to this?

They have nothing to offer anymore, no new ideas, no compassion for anyone, nothing. They are the “nothing party.” I saw Andrew Ross Sorkin on Morning Jerkoff with Starbucks this morning and he proclaimed that we must “cut taxes.” Give me a freakin break, is that the only response the right and the financial sector bots have, cut taxes? They’ve been brainwashed repeatedly over the years to believe it, like zombies “must cut taxes, must cut taxes”…..it’s so ridiculous. Albert Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” All you have to do is look back over the last 30 years at the growth of the national debt under Republican vs. Democratic presidents to see that this tactic does nothing but shift the wealth from the middle and lower income TAXPAYERS, to the wealthiest in our country who know every tax shelter and loophole there is to keep that money in their own damn pockets.

Kay over at WhiteNoiseInsanity has an excellent post up on this and other outrages from the right. Here is a sample…

Seriously, all I hear is bitching, complaining, and whining from the right wingers. Do they have any answers? Not that I can see. Let me know if you hear of one. Maybe if we all rubbed and stroked Scott Brown’s business suit the answers would come easily and our nation will be saved? Huh. Maybe.

Kay goes on to sum up the state of Republican thinking…..

Our nation had 8 years of blatant fascism under George Bush and we’ve had a one year reprieve thanks to President Obama being in the White House, but what is most disturbing is an Animal Farm Revolution is underway again where the animals are demanding to go back to those 8 years of fascism because they believe it’s better and they’ll be happier! How many times do we have to tell the imbeciles of our country that whenever we have a republican president in the White House our nation goes into a recession, our money ends up missing in huge clumps, and we end up miserable and suffering?

To paraphrase someone who isn’t coming to mind, Republicans think government can’t do anything right and then they get elected and prove it.

I’ve been stunned since the Supreme Court’s decision to sell our country off to corporations, well what’s left of our country anyway. They’ve pretty much owned it for many years, the crooked court that brought us the decision in Bush V. Gore just made it much easier for them. I’m hopeful that this will be the straw that broke the camel’s back and something will be done about this by the congress. The Rude Punditshows us what our country looks like now in this post. Here is a sample….

Hey, maybe if they’re willing to pass a couple of disclosure laws, members of Congress can all be honest about whose whores they are.

Senator Orrin Hatch is brought to you by the good people at Merck. Merck: Because Vioxx isn’t the only thing we make that’ll fuck you up.

Senator Mitch McConnell is brought to by the executives at R.J. Reynolds. R.J. Reynolds: Can you believe how much shit we’ve gotten away with?

Senator Lisa Murkowski is brought to you by the shareholders of ExxonMobil. ExxonMobil: Suck our pipeline and suck it good, America.

You have to give Republicans credit for being consistent in their support of everything bad and their being against anything good for our country. Even though most of them claim to be christians (whatever that means), they are some evil motherfuckers and just keep proving it over and over and over again.

Has the media succeeded in taking control of our government? I propose that the media uses polls to force weak-ass politicians to bend to the current will of the majority, as shown in the latest poll. Often these polls use very small samples and the methodologies of different polling organizations are wildly different. Morning Joke loves to throw polls at politicians and confront them about how their stance doesn’t fit with the majority. It isn’t just Joe (an intern was found dead in his office) Scarborough but many other talking heads and pundits do the exact same thing. Haven’t they had any statistics classes?

As Chris Matthews pointed out so pointedly on his show two nights ago, go here for more, “But the poll that was the official poll, where people had to go into the booth and vote…” that’s the only “poll” that really counts. I could rattle off all sorts of polls that have been wrong over the years for individual races, but that’s really beside the point I’m trying to make. When we elect someone, we elect that person to make judgments and represent us with the principles they ran on, and their whole world view. When I vote for a candidate, I want that candidate to make decisions based on their best judgment not whichever way the wind is blowing on that particular day.

The media just beats these polls into the public consciousness, and as we learned from the Reagan years and ever since, if you repeat something over and over again, pretty soon people start to believe it, whether it’s factually true or not. Of course the Republicans have raised it to an art form, I’m pretty sure the NEA has given them grants it’s such a powerful art form. The really shitty part of this phenomenon is that there is no good way to change it. The lazy journalists in this country use it as a crutch, heaven forbid they write an original article or do a little research or expose a crooked politician. And it gives them tremendous power that they yield over politicians, you can’t watch a Sunday morning show or any other political cable news show without a poll being dragged out and abused.

The last thing I’ll say about polls is that they are exaggerated to the extreme. “The people want this or that”….when it may very well be 52% of the people in a poll with a margin of error of +/- 4%. It drives me nuts when they completely discard the views of the other 48%. When you see a margin of error higher than 3%, the sample is usually less than 800 people, many times less than that because not every question is answered by all the participants. So often the results they spew are even smaller subgroups within the poll. “Of the people who support Obama, 20% believe this or that”…..which may very well be less than a hundred people when you divide up the pie.

If you are ever in need of a reality check about any given poll, visit Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog, he’ll give you realistic analysis and perspective too.

The one and only Rude Pundit has an excellent post up on the election in Massachusetts. WARNING! He’s rude and will probably offend, which is why I love him…in the right kind of way.

1. Oh, grow a fucking pair already, whiny goddamn Democrats like Anthony Weiner or Barney Frank. You still belong to the majority party, the big majority party. You should be out there shredding Republicans, saying that they want to take us back to the policies of the Bush administration. Put that shit on repeat and use it…

Yes, it’s time to be serious about governing, smack those republicans down, they did it to us, now it’s our turn.

3. Briefly (because anger must be released): Fuck you, Massachusetts. Not just for Brown’s election, but for voting for Coakley in the Democratic primary. And fuck you because you already have health care program in your state, which made it a fuck of a lot easier to not give a shit about the rest of the nation (and means that it wasn’t really about health care). Fuck you, White House and DSCC, for not seeing this coming…

Hell yes. This next point, I’ve been trying to make since the election, we didn’t have 60 fucking votes anyway.

4. While we’re bemoaning the loss of the super-duper majority, we have to remember that so many in the Senate Democratic caucus are weaselly fuckers. What were the odds that skeevy Joe Lieberman wasn’t going to dick over the Senate Democrats again when it came down to actually voting for health care reform? Or that the cowardly Evan Bayh (among other weasels) wasn’t going to cave?

His take on how the Repugs would have handled it.

If Republicans had wanted universal health care, you would have seen commercials with heartless insurance agents stabbing babies and drinking their blood. You would have seen ads with desperate, laid-off old men offering to blow people for quarters so they could afford their insulin. You would have seen ads about how sad it is that a depressed middle-aged woman with a dream of a scrapbooking store is now suicidal over not being able to follow her small business dream because if she left her shitty office job, she’d lose her health care. The ad would have ended with a gunshot in darkness. People would have been begging for health care reform because Republicans would have made it seem like the world would fall apart without it.

Democrats have to get brutal with them motherfucking Republicans. Take no prisoners.

The more I hear and read about what’s going on in this country, the more I think the Democrats loss in Massachusetts will help them in the long run. One thing that occurred last night during the acceptance speech by Scott Brown was his pimping out his daughters on national television. This shows the type of deep intellectual thinker that he is and with his new found attention as the face (and body) of the right, it ought to be fun watching him speak for the party. Maybe he and Sarah Palin can team up and hit the campaign circuit for other Republicans.

The Massachusetts election also poses a problem for pundits. Because there were no exit polls and the polls leading up to the race were almost exclusively “horse race” polls, every pundit in the world is going to have free reign to spin it however they want, including me. :) But what this does is let a narrative be written that may not be true, which could serve to make Republicans over confident or read meaning into something that doesn’t warrant it. Politicians are best served by having accurate information and the lack of good details about this race could potentially be a problem for Republicans.

Who’s the next contestant on The Blame Game? I personally don’t like playing the blame game, it’s not very fun. I will take a few stabs at the horrible media that pollutes my TV and Computer, but not to blame them, but to shed light on them. I heard a great program on Diane Rehm’s show on NPR this morning and it made me think how the media and to some extent, Democratic pundits, set up the “straw man” that it was a democratic seat. Now I can see calling a house seat either a dem or rep seat, because you have distinctly partisan areas in all states. But a statewide seat is fair game for all parties. Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts, remember. So I don’t think it was ever the democrats seat to begin with. They certainly had every chance to win it, but it isn’t inherently a democratic seat.

I also question people who call it this great upset, some saying the biggest upset of the century…..I seem to recall them saying that about Obama beating Hillary too. No hyperbole there, eh? A special election that puts two candidates with no national exposure and no incumbency against each other shouldn’t, in my opinion, be anything but a minor upset. She was ahead in the polls initially, but that had a lot to do with the fact that no one knew who Brown was at first. Once he started running his populist campaign, the numbers immediately began to shoot up for him. Coakley went on vacation during the month-long election, give me a break.

The last thing I’ll say is that CANDIDATES MATTER! Just like elections have consequences, so do bad candidates. I hope my party will learn a lesson from this election and choose better candidates to run in these elections, because taking any seat for granted is pretty stupid.

I’m not getting all exercised about the loss in Massachusetts for the Democrats. The independent and moderates in our country seem to blow in the wind from election to election. I still think that the Democratic party is in pretty good shape, in comparison to the Republicans. The Repugs have Rush, Glenn, Sarah, Michael Steele, Newt, Michelle Bachman, DeMint….a bunch of real winners on their side. So the democrats ran the wrong candidate in Mass, who picked her anyway? We dems have to dust ourselves off, not get too excited, regroup, set some goals and pick some great candidates to challenge all those republicans leaving the House and Senate. The wind keeps blowing and the fickle middle will swing back again. But Democrats have to show a unified front.

If Coakley wins, I’m sure the MSM is going to spin it into a loss by the president. He wasn’t on the ballot. I read that George Snuffleupagus is saying it will be the biggest upset of the century or some shit like that. That’s crazy, upset? She was appointed to fill a vacancy, she hasn’t won a national election ever, how can it be an upset. Simply because Teddy Kennedy held that seat doesn’t make it a democratic seat. Sure, the democrats will have to take a look in the mirror and learn from this election, but the big lesson from this is that if democrats want to win, they have to put up good candidates. I don’t care how long a seat has been controlled by one party or another, voters are going to pick the best candidate. It’s only the punditocracy that sees it the other way. You get what you vote for, Massachusetts, you vote for an idiot teabagger, you get an idiot teabagger. Life goes on.

I’m going out on a limb here, I think the democrats are in great shape going into the 2010 elections. I say it despite the various pundits and bloggers who are saying the opposite. I’ve been watching the dynamics of the health care reform battle, the tea party movement, the Sarah Palin phenomenon, Michael Steele, Newt Gingrich, the Obama haters, the polls and I’m beginning to think that when the dust settles in November of 2010, we will see a much different picture than people are painting right now.

The Tea Party movement will split the republicans. In many areas they are threatening to challenge republican candidates in the primary if you don’t agree with them on nearly everything. They are infiltrating the party at ground level. If they succeed in getting their kind nominated, a whole lot of republicans and independents will vote for the democrat in the general election. If they form a third party, which may happen, it will split what’s left of the conservative vote and democratic candidates will fair better. The “Tea Partiers” could have a significant effect in the primaries by selecting more extreme candidates which will turn off many moderate republicans in the general election. Both parties rely on the middle to get elected, except in districts that are solid one way or the other.

I’ve been studying election polls for years both in college courses and independently and they are used and abused by the media in many ways. My theory on polls is that they are not reliable at predicting voter behavior on election day except within a month of the election. The main reason for this is the vast majority of voters don’t really pay attention to candidates or issues until the election gets near. There are us political junkies who follow way too closely, but I keep telling myself that polls fluctuate wildly and the methodologies of many of them are questionable. For a great example of this, go read Nate Silver’s analysis of a poll commissioned by the off the rail blog Firedoglake. It’s revealing of how a poll can get you the results you want, if you write the questions and order the questions in the “right” way.

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight is the absolute best at interpreting and analyzing polls and whenever a new poll comes, I rush over to Nate’s blog and see what he has to say about it. He’s honest and tells it like it is, whether it’s what you want to hear or not.

I’m not feeling doom and gloom for the democrats in the next election. If you look at the non “horserace” questions, you get a much more accurate picture of what might happen in the future. Drawing any conclusions about what might happen 10 months from now is a fools game. My optimism for the democratic party isn’t based on polls, whether they are good ones or not. It’s based on the dynamics of many variables including the “Tea Party Movement”, health care reform and all the rest.

So having said all that, here are some numbers from polls that are revealing. The generic democratic versus republican question in regards to congress has dems at 38, reps at 37 according to PollingReport.com. My theory, which isn’t original, is that in our two party system, both parties have about 35% solid support. There is another 10% or so that are pretty reliable for each party. The last 10% can go either way. Now depending on what part of the country you live in, these can vary quite a bit, but when you average it all out, the numbers above are pretty close. This poll shows republican support at the lowest in a decade. So the battle is generally in the middle with independent and moderates from both parties. The Democratic party has been swinging towards the middle when it comes to candidates whereas the republicans are clearly swinging to the right with the Tea Party crowd, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and all the rest of the loudest, most conservative wing of the party. The independents and moderates will go towards the candidate that shows that moderation.

Now some on the left have had some success at getting the base riled up, especially about health care and Afghanistan. If we look at the health care debate in particular, the people who don’t want any reform and the ones who want the most drastic reform, have teamed up to make the president look unpopular in the current moment. That’s what happens when you compromise, you get it from both sides. But that won’t translate into a massive change in votes in the next election, I am sure of that. People will return to their base principals and vote the way they always do, except for that moderate middle, they will swing whichever way depending on lots of things. The Jane Hamshers of the world who like to threaten candidates, hold guns to their heads, smear their wives, a petition every other week demanding something or another…they have their loyal little following who may not vote or may cast a “protest” vote for a Republican. But for the most part, this effort won’t have an effect on any elections. They may try to claim they do, but they are just trying to get clicks and then more clicks on their “donate” tabs which litter all the “non profits” they seem to run. Public Policy Polling has a great post with poll results that show the democratic faithful are just that, faithful. So when these Obama haters like Hamsher, Uygur, Marsh and the few others start over-inflating their impact, throw this poll in their face and tell them to read it and weep, real democrats support their party.

Who The Hell Am I!

I’m a liberal that is extreme in some ways and not in others. I support President Obama and make no apologies for it. I think he has done a phenomenal job, especially when you consider that he inherited a huge mess and has faced unprecedented opposition from a lazy & desperate Republican Party. I’m a film producer/director/editor, adjunct professor, technician, media critic and photographer when I’m not reading left wing blogs and typing on this one. – On Twitter @ExtremeLiberal or Email at liberalforreal (at) gmail.com

Own An Important Part Of American History!

Cicely Tyson narrates this award winning documentary that tells the story of African American migration from the old south to the prosperous north. Winner of 5 Awards including "Best Film" at the Astoria International Film Festival, the "Paul Robeson Award" at the Newark Black Film Festival and "Best Film Relating To The Black Experience" at the XXV International Black Cinema Berlin/Germany!